The NBA cancels two games, and improves Sacramento's lottery odds

The NBA and the forces of Mother Nature may have just banded together to help Sacramento’s NBA draft status.

As expected, the league canceled Monday night’s Brooklyn Nets/Portland Trail Blazers and New York Knicks/Sacramento Kings games due to the blizzard that is due to wreak havoc on the East Coast. The makeup dates will take place later in the season, but as Pro Basketball Talk’s Dan Feldman noticed, the night off for the Kings on Monday comes with a nasty early-March aftereffect.

The Kings will make up the Knicks game on March 3, two days after taking on the Trail Blazers in Sacramento on the other coast of North America. From there, the team will dart across the country playing road games in San Antonio, Orlando, Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, Charlotte, Philadelphia and Washington – eight games in 11 days total, all on the road. After the final game of the road trip on March 14, the squad will then fly all the way back to its much-missed Sacramento home to take on the East-leading Atlanta Hawks on March 16th.

That is a rough, rough half-month of basketball. All for a team that is currently 16-27, well out of the playoff picture, working under a coach in Tyrone Corbin that all assume to be a walking lame duck.

All of this, however, goes a long way toward ensuring that the Kings will get to keep their lottery pick in this year’s draft.

When the Kings traded for J.J. Hickson in 2011, the team sent a conditional first-round pick to the Cleveland Cavaliers and Omri Casspi in return. That pick was then sent to the Chicago Bulls in the ill-fated Luol Deng deal last season. The pick is protected through the top ten picks in the draft this year and next, and if the Kings continue to play poorly and stick in the top ten after the lottery (considering the strength out West, there is a good chance of that) in 2017 the pick will then revert to a pair of second-round picks in 2017.

For the Kings, who are barely playing rookie Nik Stauskas so far this year, to miss out on yet another lottery pick would be a killer. Missing the playoffs only to have to ship a first-round pick to Chicago just for a guy that played 35 terrible games for you in 2011-12 would be quite the downer. This is possibly why the team fired Michael Malone, who had coached Sacramento to an 11-13 record even with center DeMarcus Cousins out for nine of those contests, earlier this year. Corbin has gone 5-14 at the helm in Sacramento.

The Kings currently sit at ninth overall in the lottery odds, with the tenth-place Detroit Pistons improving by the day. Between the coaching move, the nor’easter, and the upcoming road trip, they may have cinched their lottery fate. All it took were those elements, and a lost year, to make it happen. Congrats.

(The Portland Trail Blazers, meanwhile, will have to play the Pelicans in Portland on April 4, fly all the way out to Brooklyn on April 6, and then back to Portland to play Minnesota on April 8. All during a playoff race. Brutal.)

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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops

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